Paul Graham issues explanation for morons who can't read

"What I meant was not that Microsoft is suddenly going to stop making money, but that people at the leading edge of the software business no longer have to think about them."

I wonder what he means exactly by the 'leading edge' of the software business. I am guessing he means people who use the latest, coolest software, as opposed to the people who actually make money out of software.

Kaln
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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If Paul Graham "is" the internet, why does his website suck?

anon
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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So much time wasted debating a glorified ad.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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"if they can somehow morph themselves into something startups have to worry about again—*I'll look like a fool*. But I'm willing to take that risk."

Uhm, Paul, you've played the part of the fool LONG before your current prediction will turn out to be invalid.

Vincent
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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That's scary, I've just started learning c#...

nvictor
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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Of course, much of the response is also jealousy.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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f'ck Paul Graham! i enjoy his past essay but he is so wrong about desktop and the entire blog about "Microsoft is dead" smelled like PG is pimping his ho (his web 2.0 start up). i no longer care about what he had to say.

"Paul Graham is dead" to me.

I'm a average coder
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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I gave up on that guy when he insisted the only place to locate a startup is on a specific street in Palo Alto, no doubt where he owns an office or leases a house for the young lads he pimps.

Anon
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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My uncle told me a story about IBM and a japanese competitor. I don't remember the name of the japanese competitor though. At the end eighties beginning nineties, a japanese startup sold electronics products cheaper than IBM. My uncle, a computer re-seller, asked a representative from IBM why they are still so expensive. Their answer was "Don't fear, because even decades later, we'll still be in competition"

I don't know where IBM is in the competition, but what I know is that, that japanese company didn't replace IBM...

Ajax and Web2.0 are not going to replace Desktop.

just a share of thought

nvictor
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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The fact that he felt obliged to write a second piece to "explain" the first piece convicts him IMHO.

less is more
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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I agree with P.G. on this one.

Microsoft's behavior and culture as a company is quite similar to IBM's at their final peak in the late 1980s. MS seems to have a mentality of entitlement that the world operates in a certain way that uniquely favors them. In a large sense they have been right in this, but just as with IBM, they are losing the qualities that got them where they are at in the first place. Arrogance comes first, then incompetency swiftly follows.

They are creating products that they feel that their customers are obliged to want (eg, Vista), not what customers really want. That is *very* IBM-ish.

They are not innovating so much as elaborating what has already been done.

Their focus is on creating artificial dependencies upon their own eco-system. (Signed "everything": signed device drivers in Vista, product activation, etc) Again, a Beemish quality.

I do dispute PG's statement that Microsoft doesn't "matter". Perhaps Paul meant in terms of thought leadership. There is just too much momentum for that to be the case. But he was right in the sense that you're not going to see much "daring" in the marketplace from MS anytime soon - the truly new ideas are going to come from elsewhere.

Bored Bystander
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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People that think Microsoft is all about Vista or Windows don't understand Microsoft very well.

Doug
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Windows and Office make up the vast bulk of their profits. The fact that Vista cost so many billions and is apparently a UI and skin update, well...it doesn't seem healthy, to be sure.

But PG makes (not for the first time) the error of comparing google, an advertising company, with microsoft, a software company. Gmail is utterly, utterly laughable compared to any of MSFT's major products, but it's about the best thing they have enduser-application-wise.

"The fact that Vista cost so many billions and is apparently a UI and skin update, well...it doesn't seem healthy, to be sure."

Except that this is entirely untrue. Vista includes a complete revision of the Windows kernel. Microsoft is for some reason scared to communicate this fact, apparently because they think tech talk would alienate consumers.

What they didn't foresee is that even many (most from what I can tell) IT professionals don't bother to educate themselves beyond the most obvious marketing messages, so they are completely ignorant of the huge changes in Vista -- and the urban myth of "Vista is just a new skin" ensues.

Of course he thinks that. Even if he doesn't think it he has to say it, to help promote his little web start-ups. He's FOS.

MBJ
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Isn't Vista is based on Win2k3 since MS scratch the idea of building Vista from ground up?

I'm a average coder
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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I agree with Paul.

He isn't saying Microsoft is going the way of Digital, but he is saying that Microsoft is the new IBM. A stable commodity company, nether innovating, nor going away. They have also switched from being a company for the consumers, to a company for the corporate world.

It seems this is the 80s all over again.

claviere
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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GUI apps are intimately linked to the underlying OS, and until someone comes up...1. With a much better alternative to Windows, enough to have non-power users switch2. A virtualizer/emulator that runs Windows as fast as it runs natively on the same hardware

... it's going to take a very long time for MS to be history. What makes Windows indispensable is those millions of applications that run on that OS.

Besides, for anything beyond basic tasks like forums, web apps suck. And what happens when the Internet connection breaks for a couple of days? People can still get some work done with dedicated apps.

ZeFred
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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"Isn't Vista is based on Win2k3 since MS scratch the idea of building Vista from ground up?"

That's true but there are still a ton of changes under the hood. Mark Russinovich has written a great three-part series "Inside the Vista Kernel" that goes into some of these changes:

"Except that this is entirely untrue. Vista includes a complete revision of the Windows kernel. Microsoft is for some reason scared to communicate this fact, apparently because they think tech talk would alienate consumers."

Because nobody gives a shit. When GM insisted on sticking features in cars that nobody gave a shit about while ignoring what people do care about, they started down the path that led them to their present state.

Duff
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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No, his first essay was just bad.

If he would've compared them to SAP or Computer Associates, or even Xerox in the original article, people would have gotten it. But he didn't. He said Microsoft was dead. Now. No ifs, ands, or buts. Dead. Not dying, not irrelevant, but dead.

So why am I a moron?

Grant
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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"So why am I a moron?"

Because you're wasting your time discussing the rant of guy who cashed out years ago while you're still working for the man.

Methy
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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>That's true but there are still a ton of changes under the hood.

You originally said a "complete revision", rather than just "a revision".

The changes in the Vista kernel are hardly awe inspiring, and given the interval of time they had to do them, they are very underwhelming.

Yes, Microsoft made some changes to the kernel, as should be expected. Everyone I've seen has been "polish" type changes, such as putting a controlled attenuator on every directsound channel (which is hardly a major change of the architecture -- more correctly it's adding an interface control to augment what has been there since I signed up for the DirectMedia beta back in the late 90s).

It shouldn't be scary at all then -- while it doesn't have a monopoly dominance in the web app field, C# is a very credible server-side language, as is the Microsoft web stack. Just because you decouple from the client operating systems doesn't mean that you can't choose and use Microsoft, or that they aren't often the best choices (ASP.NET/IIS very much holds its own).

"I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops."

It's one of the reasons he thinks MS is "dead." I guess he thinks that all of the huge corporations running Windows, Office, etc. don't matter. All of the startups HE sees are running OSX, so MS must be dead or dying.

I never see anyone driving Toyota Priuses, so Toyota is dead!

anomalous
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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>I guess he thinks that all of the huge corporations running Windows...

You're exactly the sort of completely-miss-the-point person that forced him to write a dumbed-down version. Of course, I suspect many of his critics are intentionally misreading his point, desperately clutching onto their fat clients and hoping they can just criticize change away.

While I do think Paul is overstating the importance of OSX (though Apple's 6% of new PCs is pretty remarkable), to stick to it I recently was involved in the hardware decision process for a financial company.

They chose to equip their entire office with Macs.

THAT is friggin' remarkable. Five years ago that would have been an impossibility (Macs were only for audio shops and graphic designers), but now a shop looking for general purpose computing devices could so easily pick whatever they wanted, and they could just as easily have chosen Linux.

It is a colossal change in the rules of the game, and anyone who can't see that either has some blinders on, or they're intentionally blocking a torrent of evidence, clutching onto Daddy Microsoft's leg while hoping that all the bad changes will just go away.

Oh, and I should mention that I think Mr. Graham is largely full of, pardon the expression, shit. I got into a war-of-words with him on Reddit that led to so many downmods coming my way -- with many Paul defenders nicely going through my entire history downmodding every comment and submission -- that my home IP was (and still is) banned from the site.

Dennis, maybe that will be a factor in the future, if everyone follows. I'm not a MS fanboy, but you've got to admit, MS does have a lot of momentum.

I just don't see OSX as a "nail in the coffin."

I didn't miss the point. The point is that MS is no longer the big bully on the block. The government has neudered them in the respect that they can't just go out and destroy developing software markets like they used to (Netscape). They're far from dead (as Paul explained in the cliff ntoes), but I just don't think that the point I quoted really contibutes to his arguement. It's the same arguement the Linux fanboys have been trying to make for years.

anomalous
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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>The government has neutered them in the respect that they can't just go out and destroy developing software markets like they used to (Netscape).

Honestly I don't think the DoJ decrees have anything to do with the de-fanging of Microsoft.

Microsoft neutering came about largely because a small but influential group of developers and technology leaders -- they really are heroes of the entire technology industry -- didn't buy into Microsoft's tie-ins (e.g. ActiveX, Browser Behaviours, IE-only websites, and so on) and grew increasingly suspicious of Microsoft's directions. We could have ended up in the sort of absurd situation that South Korea found itself recently (where they based their entire banking system on ActiveX), but thankfully we removed the shackles early enough.

I'm not proclaiming myself a hero, btw -- in that era I was one of the fools that was happily using ActiveX, and proclaiming that it was perfectly fine to declare a site IE only ("geesh, the browser is `free' so quit complaining!"), and deriding the whole open source and open standards group.

Honestly I'm a little embarrassed about my pro-Microsoft rhetoric during that period, and I'm very glad that people like me lost the war.

>>>I do dispute PG's statement that Microsoft doesn't "matter". Perhaps Paul meant in terms of thought leadership. There is just too much momentum for that to be the case. But he was right in the sense that you're not going to see much "daring" in the marketplace from MS anytime soon - the truly new ideas are going to come from elsewhere.>>>

Are you kidding me? Have you taken a peak at the Microsoft Expressions line of products lately for WPF?

XAML is not exactly an "old" idea but a rather innovative approach to graphic design.....anything that can completely redefine rastors and vectors in the presentation of graphics certainly constitutes a truly new idea and one worth taking a second look.

Microsoft is bigger than ever and will continue to remain a defining force in technology.

Brice Richard
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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_war-of-words_

Link?

mynameishere
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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>XAML is not exactly an "old" idea but a rather innovative approach to graphic design.....anything that can completely redefine rastors and vectors in the presentation of graphics certainly constitutes a truly new idea and one worth taking a second look.

A truly new idea? Heh.

Microsoft looked at HTML coupled with SVG and said "gee, that looks pretty damn compelling...but they're open and everyone else has a headstart...

...let's make our own variation, just as we've done with 100s of technologies before, and our followers will declare it an innovation."

XAML/WPF is more of the same from Microsoft, where they completely disregard industry standards because it doesn't provide them the tie-in they so desperately want to recapture.

As an aside, my personal realization that Microsoft is not the best vanguard of the industry came about, humorously, because of the just mentioned SVG: Truly a tremendous technology -- and indeed Microsoft was involved in its standardization -- yet Microsoft did absolutely nothing to embrace it (for the reasons I mentioned above), instead talking of some long in the future Microsoft creation that would be so much better.

Microsoft just couldn't embrace something that didn't solidify their ownership of the market, even if ultimately it would have tremendously beneficial to their users.

I too agree with PG on this one, although all he's really saying is that MS's image and mindshare are way down from where they used to be. They appear to be completely out of touch with what's going on around them, and they consistently get their ass handed to them in so many different arenas.

Saying that they still make a bunch of sales misses the point. MS has peaked and is in decline, or at least, they sure as hell seem to be. I hope I am wrong but I doubt it.

JS
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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The comment about Vista containing a complete rewrite of the Windows kernel is interesting.

I worked at IBM in 1988 as a contractor through a bodyshop and I witnessed IBM engaging in just a goliath SW development project that was doomed to failure that sounds very much like accounts I have read of Vista. Watching the other developers on the IBM project was like watching a castle getting built piece by piece by ants dragging grains of sand around. Progress was utterly painful, no one person really understood the architecture we were implementing, and the project spiraled out of control with cost and schedule overruns.

If you'd talk to a manager at IBM about what was going on, they would fuss about how unstable and crappy the PC software inherently was and how stable VM and related OSs were.

IBM was plagued internally by myopic fealty to a notion that the architecture was much, much more important than the individual components. IOW, the individual parts might be crap, but because golden IBM design philosophy pervaded things, everything would be "perfect".

I get very, very similar vibes from within Microsoft and from adherents. An attitude that "the system" will prevail just because.

Bored Bystander
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Go to yconnector.com and watch the rotating images of "the team" working during dinner. Yes, I see some macs, but the first image has a dell laptop that I assume is running windows. Paul - are you looking at the computers there your lads are using?

koderklam
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Forget about PG, this discussion should be around the idea he's brought forward about Microsoft's role in the IT world having changed. It's not a new idea really, but because he's now said it, a lot of attention in this community has been drawn to it.

The question is, has Microsoft lost the luster it once had, however you want to define that, in some significant way such that it's on the decline? Yes, and if Microsoft doesn't change, it will come to a point where it will have to be restructured, broken apart, or refocused in some way. We aren't talking specifics here, but patterns, and the reason why Microsoft will face its own decline is simply the nature of organizations in a changing environment.

IBM missed the boat with PCs, and they missed it because IBMers belonged to a culture that shared a mindset or world view about reality and literally couldn't see that the PC was a disruptive change that would impact their mainframe business model. When they finally "got it", it was too late -- Microsoft and the PC had passed the tipping point and there was no way IBM could take it back. IBM faced its own demise, Lou Gerstner was brought in, and he refocused the company on integrated solutions, not the mainframe. In some of the comments here I see people saying that IBM is still successful and doing well, which is true, but IBM is not in the same business it was in at the time -- it _had_ to change course, and if it hadn't done so it would probably no longer exist. Read Lou Gerstner's book about his time there and how he refocused IBM -- he literally had to change their culture, and he says that.

The Internet is disrupting Microsoft's desktop business model, and will continue to do so. Does anyone think Microsoft would still be around if it had continued to ignore the Internet? Microsoft tried to take over the Internet by making proprietary stuff, and had there not been a pre-existing base of open standards, they would have succeeded. Just like IBM tripped, so did Microsoft. In this case, the Internet had passed the tipping point where Microsoft could have any real impact on its fundamental openness, and even had they "gotten it" earlier, it was already based on open standards, Unix, TCP/IP. Microsoft got co-opted by the Internet, not the other way around. Microsoft's culture didn't "get it" and to a large extent, still doesn't.

Is it any wonder then that Microsoft fought the ODF issue in Mass. so hard? When file formats become more open, Microsoft will lose its monopoly position with Office that only exists today because people want to be interoperable. Microsoft is now and has been for quite some time, on the defensive, and while they may win a battle here and there, they will lose the "war" -- they will have to change in some fundamental way, just as IBM had to, or face extinction or be marginalized. Yes, perhaps Microsoft will still exist and will still have billions, but it will be a shadow of its former self, and it will no longer dominate the IT scene even on the desktop. In fact, I will venture to say that there really is nothing that Microsoft can do to "win" back what it once was -- the environment has changed, and that organizational culture will have to change to survive. When it does change, it won't be the old Microsoft, it will be something different, just as IBM is now fundamentally different. Who in the 1980's or early 1990's would have ever thought IBM would hire programmers to work on an open source operating system?

Scott Goodwin
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Microsoft matters for IT and companies. MS does not matter in the space that Paul Graham plays in - web startups. So what? Accept the fact that MS is a big slow old company that will introduce some cool things for the enterprise, but won't interest the younger crowd or those not in enterprise IT. To prove his point. Google apps vs Office Live. Which one gives you an online word processor? How can it be called "office live" with no word processing or spreasheet capabilities.

don't have a cow man
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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I think PG meant to point out that what happened to IBM has happened to MS, which makes sense in a certain way, but not completely. IBM is still a leader in R&D, and new ideas and technologies - real ones and really new ones - still come from them regularly. Yet, you don't hear the same corporate mantras about them that you once did. They're not gone - they've just faded from the buzzword-of-the-day landscape, although not into irrelevancy, and nor will MS ever.

While new and interesting things do come out of MS, its just not often you see those things, good as they are, making the same kind of impact MS was once able to muster. And, full of great new things and gifted people they may be, the corporate culture that somehow manages to make poor software out of good ideas still trumps the potential of those ideas to affect the landscape at redmond.

Bithead
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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To clarify the above, as apparently it has gotten a bit of attention: I *can* still access Reddit, but from a certain IP I can't moderate, and posted comments immediately go to a score of 0, invisible to everyone else. It's actually weird because they did it by IP, and not by account, so I'm find elsewhere.

Big deal. It's their site and they can do whatever they want with it. I presume that I got trapped in an "anti-spam" filter, which is fine.

"Google apps vs Office Live. Which one gives you an online word processor?"

Neither. Google Apps has a nice toy demo of one, though.

Iago
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Yes, reddit blocks people they disagree with all the time. As you can see from the head reddit, if you disagree with them, they consider you a spammer.

"It looks like his IP was used to spam reddit at one point."

and obviously if you disagree with them then you are a foolish conspiracy theorist:

"jumping to conclusions and blind-siding us with some foolish conspiracy theories."

anon4reddit
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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"...the first image has a dell laptop that I assume is running windows."

That's a poor assumption. I like Dell laptops and will consider one for my next, but I'd immediately put Ubuntu on it.

Matt Brown
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Microsoft isn't dead. But it's slowly dying.

While I profoundly disagree with PG's statements about the proliferation of non-MS workstations in the world, I don't disagree with the premise of his two columns.

But he doesn't really point out the problem, other than some vague comments about lack of innovation etc.

I'll tell you Microsoft's problem: Within five years, there will be variations of municipal WiFi, WiMax, etc. rolled out to service huge amounts of suburbia and metropolitan areas.

People will be able to open their laptops in parks, buses and parking lots and have instant access to Google's upcoming array of workable applications, along with storage of files.

Those people will have absolutely no use for installing expensive software applications, and so they won't.

Unless Microsoft finds a way to push Word, Excel, and Outlook to users from their servers instead of the desktop, they will very quickly lose a huge percentage of market share.

Game. Set. Match. Google.

The clock is running for MS. They are dying if they can't fix this problem.

Joe MacDonald
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Joel pointed out two years ago that MS had actually lost the battle with Netscape, in that it had lost control of the web.

Despite all its push with .NET and Asp it has not regained control.

It is in a more vulnerable position now than it was before. Ten years ago software came on a CD, and if it was consumer software you could bet your bottom dollar you would need Windows to run it.

Now much software is web software; the media center idea is dead as people are buying dedicated boxes that often have a free OS and cost less in total than a Vista license.

Stephen Jones
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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"Microsoft matters for IT and companies. MS does not matter in the space that Paul Graham plays in - web startups".

PG plays in the 2 21 year olds, $10G, 1 summer, having too much fun to care about revenue web startup space. That's an extreme fringe. Not to say great companies can't (or haven't) come out of it, but their particular choices and concerns don't apply universally. I personally feel the MS stack ( VS, asp, .net, sql server etc. ) is currently _the_ premier environment for startup development of a large class of webapps, and that MS's relevance in this space is actually increasing. At least until the mythical Arc becomes reality :). And someone writes a compiler for it targetting .net :):)

Stuki Moi
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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"Now much software is web software; the media center idea is dead as people are buying dedicated boxes that often have a free OS and cost less in total than a Vista license."

Apple - only a threat if Apple will let go of control on bundling OS X with hardware.

linux - OSS fools have been singing the same old song since RedHat go IPO.

until Apple became a software only company and liscense their OS X to other OEM. Apple will never reach the mass market.

"free OS and cost less" so fucking what! Until OSS zealots decide on one distro, one GUI and come up with an OS that is actually useful as desktop. Linux will never over take MS Windows.

You're singing the same old repeated song. I'll believe your b.s. when you stop repeating the same old boring shits.

I'm a average coder
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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Microsoft did some incredibly stupid things when they were fighting the DOJ over bundling. They were very lucky that election year politics blew this over. This might give some insight into why they have become so weak.

I still give them credit for being the only tools developer that really values ease of use in software development. I expected (quite wrongly) that over time developers would become marginalized in favor of domain experts that would do most of the work of programming. It seems like quite the opposite is happening. Application developers that just consider the toolset as a necessary evil in writing software are being frozen out by trivia contest job interviews and growing complexity in software development platforms like Firefox and Linux.

Will the task of software development show signs of progress during my lifetime? I still hold out hope.

ItsTheAppStupid
Thursday, April 12, 2007

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"People will be able to open their laptops in parks, buses and parking lots and have instant access to Google's upcoming array of workable applications, along with storage of files."

And those "upcoming" applications will be totally just as good as MS Office! And those Internet connections will never crash when you need them! And nobody will ever want to leave those WiFi cities and still access their documents! And nobody will mind storing all their personal documents on some company's remote server! There will be no security and privacy issues whatsoever!

And people will be ordering pet food from web shops with free delivery! And all the new web companies will be valued higher than Exxon because the old economy is dead!

It's not just the fringe that sees Microsoft as less of an influencer and Google as more. Time Magazine had similar sentiment to PG in it's person of the year issue, saying "BILL GATES. Who's he? This time it's mostly about Google. " in its article about hot companies.

>And people will be ordering pet food from web shops with free delivery!

This is a pretty common technique used to deny the tremendous industry changes we're undergoing (the percentage of the IT industry corporate developers working on web apps has absolutely exploded, possibly to the point of demographic dominance) -- refute some previous change that wasn't fully realized.

But you know what? I buy all my books from online. I do all of my banking online. I buy almost all of my electronics online. I get all of my financial statements through email, and so on.

"It's not just the fringe that sees Microsoft as less of an influencer and Google as more. Time Magazine had similar sentiment to PG in it's person of the year issue, saying "BILL GATES. Who's he? This time it's mostly about Google. " in its article about hot companies."

Tool! Gates or new hawtness Google will sell more issue?

Rudy (NYC Mayor) or Bin Laden(9/11) will sell more issue?

spoon-feed media, much?

.
Thursday, April 12, 2007

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I think Dennis Forbes makes a good point - the infamous dot-bomb episodes don't mean that the ideas from those companies are not feasible. A lot has changed since then - much lower costs, less "irrational exhuberance", and much greater adoption by the general public of online activity.

Scott Meade
Thursday, April 12, 2007

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blank - right you are that people are talking about google more than MS and most want to read about google more than MS. That's what I think Graham means when he says MS is becoming less and less relevant.

Scott Meade
Thursday, April 12, 2007

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Vista is not what's interesting about Microsoft. It's their development tools that are truly innovative. LINQ is going to empower a new generation of developers to leverage parrallel processing. The other mainstream languages server-side languages like Java, Python, and Ruby are nowhere on this problem. As long as they continue to produce fantastic development tools and have the marketing muscle to promote them they'll be a force to be reckoned with.

The pet.com comparison is apt. Why would I want to run an inferior spreadsheet in a browser riddled with bugs when there are already several free office alternatives? The web is just not a suitable platform for a lot of applications.